Avalon is truly and amazing thing. The demos they just showed us included dragging elements around in a window and rotating them while running.. this included an embedded movie (which was added to the app with one XAML tag and a few lines of “code-behind” to hook up a toggle button. Everything in Avalon is vector based and goes right to the video card and takes advantage of hardware acceleration, just like games do. This gives you a lot in terms of capabilities for effects and UI styling in you apps. Adobe did a demo in the keynote which showed how they tweaked After Effects to create an animation template UI that got live data from a web service and displayed it in the app (this is a lot like flash, but it’s way way way beyond what flash offers today.. although they seem to be moving there). They also demoed how you could do personalization in your app with only a different from end… this also gives you the flexibility to have a UI graphics designer do your UI and have programmers do the coding (how ASP.NET works now).
It was very impressive and as an Intranet applications developer, it made me wonder if any of the things that make an intranet appealing to run internal application is relevant anymore. I mean you can now do OneClick deployment (and updates) of Win apps which can call out to web services (centralized logic) to perform functionality. So you have all the benefits of web but with a much richer UI and tighter integration with the users computer and files (because you dont have the security problems of a hostile app like a web browser). Of course I am saying this without attending any of the ASP.NET 2.0 sessions but it will be interesting to see how it will evolve along these lines.
more to come.
Misc
I just got back from the material desk and obtained my copy of the PDC bits. The DVD binder is a black spongy material with “the goods” written on the cover. Besides the bits they gave us a book “Introducing Longhorn for Developers” and a poster of the WinFX that has an overview of the new API. Inside the DVD sleeve is the following:
Longhorn DVD 1 & 2 which includes: longhorn (32 and 64bit), white papers, sample code, self-guided tour, sample book chapters and the like. The longhorn DVD required that you get a license key from a windows preview site. They have a page in each DVD set that has a unique login and password for each copy it appears.
Specs required to run Longhorn:
CPU: 1.6Ghz
RAM: 1 GB
Graphics: Dx7, min 1024×768 @ 32bits, 32MB at min res (recommended dx9, 64Mb)
Yukon CD (resource CD is avail at the SQL Server booth)
Specs Req.:
CPU: 700Mhz
RAM: 512MB
And an interesting note on this CD: “Longhorn” is not a supported platform for the “Yukon” PDC Preview.
Whidby DVD
CPU: P3 800Mhz
RAM: 56MB
HD Space: 1GB on system drive, 4GB on install drive.
Misc
Well I guess the PDC isn’t going to disappoint. I am not sure I am a good enough writer to describe what I just saw demoed and how cool it really was.
I had really good seats for the keynote which was nice. I was 15 rows back on the isle. It was interesting as it dawned on me… the richest man in the world was 15 rows away from me. Nothing too exciting, but not an everyday event.
Bill G. Started things off talking about the history of computing and had a really funny video which I hope becomes available online for everyone to enjoy. It reminded of Chris Pirillo’s birthday video.. not quite as funny, but very good. Then came the demos. They started with a demo of the Longhorn UI and OS. This looked very nice and I liked what they have done with the usability features in the way things are presented. I think the side bar they have added which provided context aware data is a very sweet feature. The really cool stuff came though when they started to show (albeit at a high level) how you can tap into these various features. Don Box and Chris A. Did a number of demos starting with Avalon and moving to WinFS and then on to Indigo (this whole thing is now called WinFX). Avalon was awesome as they showed how easy it is do use XAML to create controls for a windows app… this seemed VERY similar to me to Web forms and code behind the way they did it. They had markup to declare a tag with an ID and and an event pointer and the used some C# to handle the nitty gritty. But of course this was on a windows app, not a we app. Then they showed the WinFS stuff which was also very cool. They showed how you could add meta data to a file by simply dragging it onto a “stack” which you define (which is like a category) and walla.. the file is associated with that category. The cool part was though that you could associate the same file with many stacks and just do multiple-stack filtering from the explorer toolbar to narrow down your result set. It was also awesome when they showed an app that used visual cues to highlight relationships between files in a “folder”. So they 4 vertical panels with “info” in it and when you clicked on a document on the left it highlight the contacts on your system that were related to that document. The basic point is that the whole schema underneath all of this stuff is all accessible as well so you can hook into these same relationships in your apps.
Then came the indigo piece which is the glue that handles all of the communication between the different parts. Don showed how easy it was to build a port and message and send it to his blog. I think ingido is the most crtical part of this whole framework because it has the hardest job of ensuring authorization and security of this communication… AND they have to make it simple to use and configure. I think this is a huge challenge and it will be interesting to see in the coming months what we see them coming up with. But if they get it right, connecting apps with be amazingly easy.
Time to grab lunch before the next session!
.NET, Misc
I have noticed a lot of people blogging about PDC hotel arrangements and how hard it has been for them to get a place to stay. When I registered I noticed, as did everyone else, that the hotels were booked for certain nights and so you could not make a reservation. Well I called the number on the bottom of the PDC registration form and the lady that helped set me up with everything! She looked over the choices and told me should would book me for the 4 nights available and send a special note to her contact at the hotel letting her know she needed another room at the good rate. Within 1 day I had all 5 nights in the hotel I wanted! So for those of you who are getting ready to register, call the registration help desk and let them help you… they will do all they can to get you into a nice place to stay.
Misc
